Day 257 - Resurfacing - Chapter 3 - (1141 words)

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RESURFACING

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 3

Italy

Meticulous, that was the word I was thinking of, meticulous. Everything in order. Not just in place, but in the right place, the right time and the right angle. Life was never this meticulous, never this perfect and never showing this degree of order.

That is the joy of hotels, the more anal and obsessive compulsive the better. Left to your own devices this kind of setting never presents itself without hard work and planning. The regularity and meticulousness of doing this as a daily task only comes from obsession or employment. The business of keeping it like this is the benefit and joy of hotels, even the ones that are only four stars, they have an edge over the flop houses, apartments and boarding houses of three stars and below where you rely on the cleanliness and obsession of the person before you.

You rely on their natures but you generally are sharing more bodily fluid that you want to admit.

I can hear the vacuum cleaner buzzing in the room next to mine, the adjoining doors between the rooms lets through only the lowing hum of the machine at work, removing hair, skin and fibre from the floors and the furniture. It's my room next and I am torn between staying for the performance, watching the artist at work and leaving them to the job in peace. What kind of artist really wants to be watched as they work their masterpiece? Only the kind where the art is not about the piece, but about the artist.

Cleaning as a work of art is about the result, not about the process. You can know too much and you have the temptation to shape the result, something most people do not take kindly to. Don't tell me how to clean, what order to do it in, how I could do it better? I imagine this is what it must be for any artist with an audience, you want them to appreciate what you do but there is a line not to cross.

The arrogance of the audience, I love your work but it would be better if you listened to me.

No, that is as mad as you can get. The art made to specification is not art, that is when it becomes design.

So leave them to their art, I do not want the cleanliness of my room to be sullied by the specificity of requests. So I must burst the bubble and take in the chaos of the outside, which I would definitely have to do at some point. My feet have already begun to tap to the rhythm of the streets, hands planted in my pockets and readying them for the cadence of walking to the beat of the streets.

There was a pattern and effectiveness to what seemed like chaos and imminent catastrophe. That was the thing about Rome, if you were uninitiated then it seemed like madness and everything was barely a split second from disaster. Those things, those worst case scenarios never eventuate. All the time I see people almost getting run over, almost coming to blows, missing the speeding train, bus or motorcycle in the blink of an eye all have the one thing in common.

Almost.

For all the potentially tragic outcomes, the shock and fear of the worst is the worst I have seen. Maybe I am lucky to have never crossed paths with the unlucky, maybe I am just blind to the misfortunes of others, but all of that is adding up to the pattern I think I have detected, the innate ability to dance among the moving parts of the city of Rome and survive within it's ancient boundaries.

Maybe age has something to do with it, the Coliseum, the Roman Forum and the churches that lurk over every corner with friezes and pastries of stone offering history for every meal. Every one of these things remind you how old, how much a survivalist the city has become in the millennia that it has existed. Home has barely a quarter of a single millennium, let alone it's plural forms. Where you would think that entropy has bent the city to it's will, instead you find the wise bones of a living thing.

The Eternal City, a cliché but one born of a singular truth. Eternal before it became old, it was named so in it's infancy, a prophecy of longevity if ever there was one. I wonder about my home town and can't imagine Sydney two and a half thousand years in the future. It's only just recognisable merely two and a half centuries from it's beginnings. It is one tenth of the age and has one tenth of the soul, and so this is where I feel like home now.

That's what drew us to the place when we were young, when we last touched we touched here. The circular notion of returning to what? The scene of the crime?

The cleaning crew have moved through my room with a CSI like efficiency, obliterating the diret and the detritus that I have brought with me on the short trip from the airport to the train to the hotel. Three stops after the antiseptic sprayed flight landed at Fiumicino and all I really have is some small dust and a lot of sweat, but it is still refreshing to hit the refresh button after my walk around a few small city blocks near the Roma Termini and come back to my room all cleaned and turned again.

I spin around in the space, looking to see I am alone, when I know I am.

The bins are empty and the beds are turned in neat corners ready to receive whatever they might in the Eternal City, the city of love and lovers.

Why am I stalled in my hotel room? What draws me to the neatness and the tidiness of it, that keeps me from finding her, from seeking the truth. She drew me here, and I hide in this dirty hole like a rat avoiding the sun.

Just like that the imperfections become visible and the room becomes painful to be in. The darted folds in the toilet paper rolls look like knives, cutting and stabbing at me. The bidet, functionally clean but a history of the most intimate of contamination that could ever exist, could it ever be clean enough now? It screams it's filth at me.

I need impetus and it's coming to me uncomfortable and raw, pushing me from my safe haven and back to the streets, despite the sun's retreat and the clouds that foreshadow a change in weather, I am out the door and breathing heavily on the little road that feeds scooters into the bloodstream of the downtown traffic arteries.